Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755 after eight years’ work. It was not the first English dictionary, but its 42,733 entries, illustrated with literary quotations, made it an unusually ambitious record of how words were used. Johnson’s achievement was also part of a much wider career: he wrote poetry, essays, a play, criticism and biography, and became one of the most celebrated literary figures of his age.

A bookseller’s son from Lichfield

Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on 18 September 1709. His father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller, and Samuel grew up around books in the family home above the shop. He attended Lichfield Grammar School and, in 1728, entered Pembroke College, Oxford. His studies lasted only 13 months: the money available to him was not enough to cover his expenses, and he returned to Lichfield without a degree. Oxford later awarded him an MA in 1755, the year his Dictionary was published.

Financial difficulty continued to shape his early working life. Johnson tried teaching, including at a school he established at Edial, near Lichfield. The venture failed, and in 1737 he went to London with his former pupil David Garrick, who would become a celebrated actor. Johnson began writing for The Gentleman’s Magazine, contributing work of striking range and variety. His poem London, published anonymously in 1738, drew on Juvenal to portray the city through crime, poverty and corruption.

He wrote for publishers while living with uncertainty over money and work. His early publications included the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), about the poet with whom he had shared periods of poverty, and the poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). He also wrote the tragedy Irene, staged in 1749. These works began to establish his reputation, but it was the dictionary that would give his career its defining undertaking.

Eight years making a dictionary

In 1746, a group of publishers commissioned Johnson to compile a dictionary of English. He initially estimated that he could finish in three years; the work took eight. He prepared a plan in 1747 and worked with assistants, who copied out passages he had marked in books. Those quotations, arranged to illustrate words in use, connected definitions with examples from literature, including Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden.

A Dictionary of the English Language was published in April 1755. Its two large volumes contained 42,733 entries and approximately 114,000 quotations. The scale of the enterprise helped distinguish it from earlier dictionaries, although it was neither the first English dictionary nor the only one with a substantial vocabulary. Johnson’s work became pre-eminent and remained widely used and imitated until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.

The dictionary was not simply a list of definitions. Its quotations placed words in context and recorded how writers had used them. Johnson’s work therefore served both as a reference book and as an act of literary criticism, examining the language of authors including Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton. The project brought him public recognition, but it did not make him wealthy: royalties for authors were not customary, and his payment came from fulfilling the contract rather than from the book’s subsequent sales.

Johnson continued to write while compiling the Dictionary. From 1750 to 1752, he published 208 essays as The Rambler, often treating moral and religious questions in a serious, reflective style. He later wrote for The Idler and produced the philosophical novella The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759). The story follows a prince who leaves a sheltered valley to consider whether any way of life can secure happiness. Johnson wrote it quickly to meet expenses after his mother’s death; it became popular and was translated into several languages.

Shakespeare, Scotland and the lives of poets

Johnson’s work on Shakespeare brought together scholarship and practical criticism. His edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, published in 1765, included notes intended to explain difficult passages and to address errors in earlier editions. He argued that editors should establish the text carefully rather than alter passages merely because they seemed difficult. His commentary also defended Shakespeare’s closeness to ordinary life while identifying what Johnson regarded as faults in the plays.

In 1762, George III granted Johnson an annual pension of £300. It gave him a measure of independence in later life, after years of precarious finances. Johnson was also part of a circle of writers and artists that included Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick and James Boswell. He met Boswell in 1763; their friendship later made Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson one of the best-known accounts of an individual life in English.

In 1773, Johnson travelled through Scotland with Boswell. Johnson’s account, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, appeared in 1775. His final major literary undertaking was Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, published between 1779 and 1781. Its biographies and critical assessments of 52 poets combined literary judgement with attention to the details of their lives. Johnson believed biography should aim at accuracy rather than simply praise its subjects, and he considered the lives of less famous writers worth recording as well as those of celebrated figures.

Johnson died in London on 13 December 1784, aged 75, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Boswell’s biography, published in 1791, helped fix Johnson’s reputation in the public imagination. It was one of several accounts of his life, alongside recollections and records by people who had known him, including Hester Thrale and John Hawkins. Johnson’s own writing and the biographies about him thus became closely connected parts of his literary afterlife.

Why Samuel Johnson deserves a place in British Legacy

Johnson’s place in British literary history rests on work that joined close attention to language with a lasting body of writing. The Dictionary gathered more than 42,000 entries and used literary quotations to show words in context. Its achievement was not that it invented English lexicography, nor that it settled the language once and for all, but that one scholar produced a substantial, influential reference work which readers and writers used for generations. By treating examples from literature as evidence of usage, Johnson made the dictionary a record of both words and the culture in which they appeared.

His contribution extends beyond the Dictionary. The Shakespeare edition addressed how readers encounter difficult texts; Lives of the Poets brought critical judgement together with biography; and essays such as The Rambler and the novella Rasselas explored questions of conduct and happiness. His own life also became a landmark in biography through Boswell’s account, which drew on their friendship and on the world of writers, artists and readers around Johnson. Born in Lichfield, educated at Oxford and established in London’s literary life, Johnson’s career is closely rooted in Britain’s intellectual history. His work continues to matter because it offers more than a monument to one writer: it shows how careful attention to language, texts and lives can become a shared resource for readers.

Sources

Samuel Johnson — Wikipedia, revision 1375704275

Adapted in part from Samuel Johnson by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.